What is a Niche?

Our job as an internet marketer is essentially finding a niche, building a website and then creating high quality content to solve specific problems in that niche.

This way, you'll build trust with your visitors, they'll perceive you as the expert on the topic, they will trust you and your expertise, and ultimately make their purchase decisions following your recommendations.

The word niche and market, by the way, are used interchangeably.

So, if I say that I found a great market, it's the same thing as finding a great niche and vice versa.

However, not all niches are created equal. There are niches that are far better and more profitable than others.

In fact, there are 5 major verticals where 95%+ of the money is made online.

They are:

Health & Fitness

Wealth & Money

Relationships & Dating

Self Improvement

Hobbies, Interests & Activities

The first 3 verticals represent the key areas that everyone needs to work on in their lives.

As an old saying goes: "Everyone wants to get paid, laid and live forever".

The later 2 are something that people are super passionate about and often spend money on happily.

To conclude:

Any niche or sub-niche that fall into one of the above 5 categories are likely to be profitable.

How To Find Your Niche in 7 Steps

Now you know what a good niche looks like, let me show you how you can actually find your own niche in 7 easy steps.

This is the same process that I’ve used many times to discover high potential niches that have allowed me build a full time income from my niche authority websites.

Let’s start with the first step.

1. Brainstorm Niche Ideas

This step is fairly simple and you shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes on this.

Just go grab a pen and a piece of paper.

Go do it now. I’ll wait.

…

Ready?

Now, as quickly as you can, write down your answers to the following questions:

What am I personally passionate about?

What am I really good at and can help others with?

What activities do I love to do in my spare time?

What things do I plan on learning really well?

What are my problems that I'm looking for solutions online?

What types of books and magazines do I usually read?

Which blogs am I following?

Don't overthink here.

Just write down any ideas that come to mind.

I’ll show you how to evaluate them later in the next few steps.

2. Select Your Top 3

By now you should have at least 10 niche ideas in your list.

Think through your ideas more carefully this time and pick the top 3 that are most meaningful to you.

Ideally, your top 3 niches should be something that you love and want to build a business around.

Even if you’re not super passionate about a niche, spending a few hours reading about it shouldn’t sound like a boring task to you.

Think about it:

If you can’t stand the idea of spending time researching a niche, how could you actually build something good for people in that niche?

Your top 3 niches should also be under big 5 competitive verticals so that you know there's money to be made.

No worry if you're not 100% sure about a niche, these are not your final picks.

We’ll be diving deep into market research from step 3 to 6.

This is a very comprehensive process that would give you a holistic view of a niche you’re about to enter.

Let’s get into it.

3. Identify Your Competitors

A key part in my niche research process is identifying and analyzing competitors.

This alone would give me 90% of the information I need to know about a niche.

But first, who are your competitors?

Quite simply, they’re blogs and websites that are targeting the same audience that we’re going after.

In other words, they’re targeting & ranking on Google for the same set of keywords that we’d like our website to rank for.

That’s why competitor analysis gives you so much information about the potential of a niche.

Using the tactics that I’m covering in this guide, you’ll be able to to discover:

Their content strategy. What topics they’re writing about?

Their traffic strategy. How are they getting traffic?

Their monetization strategy. How are they making money?

How to Identify Your Competitors

First, you need to brainstorm a list of keywords that people in your niche are likely searching for.

If this niche is something that you know about, you should be able to do this quickly.

For example, let’s say I’m researching the Keto Diet niche. Here’s a keyword list that come off the top of my head:

This guide is getting 160,387 visits per month from search. It’s ranking for some of the biggest keywords in the niche, such as:

Keyword

Search Volume

Ranking

Keto Diet

423,000

#1

Ketogenic Diet

289,000

#1

What is keto diet

8,000

#3

This guide is very comprehensive (7320 words). It covers everything a beginner need to know about the Keto Diet.

The content was well formatted making it very easy to read.

According to Ahrefs, it’s linked from 719 referring domains. Also, there’s a social sharing bar on the page which shows 46.5K FB shares and 7.6K Pinterest shares.

Overall, I think this is a very successful piece of content and can be considered a pillar article for a website about Keto Diet.

That means if I were to build a website for this niche, having a comprehensive beginner’s guide like this is a MUST.

You can also click on Top Content to see which articles are the most popular on social media.

Try to answer the following questions when analyzing a competitor’s content:

What are the articles that get the most traffic from search? What keywords are they ranking for?

What are the articles that attract the most backlinks?

What are the articles that do well on social media?

What are the articles that lack depth and quality? Can I create better content than my competitor?

Monetization

To identify the monetization methods that our competitor is using, simply visit their website.

Then browse around and pay attention the following:

Banners / Ads on blog posts.

Product / Shop pages.

External link to ecommerce stores.

Opt in to their email list and see what’re promoting via email.

For example, just by visiting Ruled.me’s homepage, I can see that it’s promoting its own digital product called The Keto Academy.

It’s also recommending some products as an affiliate:

There doesn’t seem to be any ads on the website. It’s optimized for lead generation by placing opt-in forms on articles:

There’s also a mention of Keto Academy at the end of every article:

5. Dig Deeper Into The Niche

Competitor research alone would give you 90% of what you need to know to determine the potential of a niche.

But wait, there’s still some additional research we can do:

Research Niche Forums / Communities

Online communities are the best source of information about your target audience. Just spending some time researching these groups and you’ll be able to identify common topics that people are talking about.

This data is very valuable. It would help you understand your target audience better.

Here are some of my favorites:

Facebook groups. Facebook is so big that no matter what niche you are in, you will probaby find at least one group on the topic. Simply go to Facebook, search for your keyword, and then click on “Groups”.

Reddit. Reddit is really big and it covers every topic under the sun. Just go to Reddit, type in your keyword, and press the search button.

Quora. Go to Quora, type in your keyword in the search bar, and you’ll see topics related to it.

Any niche that has active groups, forums, subreddit and Quora pages is pretty much guaranteed to be profitable.

Look at Best-Selling Products

We can easily identify best-selling products in a niche by visiting these 3 big product marketplaces:

1. Amazon

Go to Amazon. There, you want to check two things, physical products and Kindle books. You want to look for products and books with a lot of reviews (30+) and good ratings (4+ stars).

#2 Clickbank

Go to Clickbank. Go to Affiliate Marketplace. Type in your keyword into Find Products search field. Then, just look at the products that are being sold. Pay attention to products that have the gravity of 5 or more (the higher the gravity, the more sales are people making with this product).

#3 Udemy

Go to Udemy. Type in your keyword in the search field. Take a look at the courses that come up in the search results. Pay attention to products with a lot of ratings.

Find Affiliate Programs in The Niche

The more affiliate programs there are, the better, because it means not only that there is a demand, but also that there are plenty of products you can promote on your website.

There are 2 ways to find affiliate programs in your niche:

Google Search. Just go to google.com and type in KEYWORD + affiliate program.

OfferVault.This is a big directory of thousands of affiliate programs in a variety of niches.

6. Do The Viability Check

The final step in the niche selection process is the viability check. Is this niche a good niche for you?

Here are three questions that you need to answer:

How passionate are you about this niche? In my experience, the more passionate you are about the niche, the more likely you are to persevere through difficulties and put a lot of effort into the project.

How knowledgeable are you about this niche? If you know a lot about the niche, you can create really good content in that niche, which increases your odds of success.

Are you capable of creating content for this niche? Generally, I think that people should write their own content for the first few months, so they could really understand the niche better. Writing your own content will also save you a lot of money!

I really suggest you to seriously think about these questions before starting your website.

If you’re building your site for the first time, then I’d recommend choosing something that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about.

It’s okay if don’t want to create content yourself. You can always outsource writing. Just make sure that the writer you hire knows what he or she is talking about!

7. Choose Your Niche

Congratulations! You should have done all of your research at this point. It's time to make your decision.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula when it comes to deciding on your niche. Ultimately it’s up to personal preference. A perfect niche to me might be very different to yours.

But if you've done your homework, you should have a pretty good idea on which niche is a good one for you.

Listen to your gut.

Pick one that you like the most and stick with it.

If you’re not sure what to pick. Remember there are always rooms for you in big markets like Health, Fitness, Beauty, Home, Pet, etc. You just need to dig deeper to find good opportunities.

Don't get stuck here forever. You won't learn anything by thinking about it. Just pick a niche and get started building your 1st website.

Even if a few months down the road you realized this is not a good one for you, you can start this niche selection process again and find another niche.

What’s Next?

I hope you have found this guide helpful. This is the exact niche selection process that I’ve used many times to find profitable niches for myself.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

By the way, if you want to see the video version of this guide and download the market research worksheet that I'm using, join Cloud Living Academy Premium to get instant access.

Nice overview of niche selection process. Just one question: Would you recommend going into a niche which is into the top 3 niche you mentioned here but don’t have much knowledge about it and not sure If I can create content myself but I am passionate about it?

Yes totally. If you’re passionate, you can for sure educate yourself to be knowledgeable. Then you can hire writers to help you with content writing. Make sure the niche is proven to be profitable too.

Find Your Niche – only 3 word but its a huge work. I tried more then 20 days finding a profitable niche, but i failed. Still now trying. Big giant companies drink all keywords. Last year I build a single niche site “baby stroller”, project failed. Domain is niche related, but not EMD. Almost $4000 invest gone. Generate around $20-$25 couple of months. Last 4 months income is almost zero. I did not use any PBN links for this site.

Now I wants to decide build a multi niche – is it wise decision ?

Need some suggestion from you – How can i recover from 1st site ? Do u please give me some ideas ? If you have free time !!

One thing I do when I go to a new niche is to look for what I call “low hanging fruit” keywords. These are keywords that are easy to rank for based on the competition. Most of the keywords have low searches (less than 100) and are usually long tail.

For example, for your case of baby strollers, the KW “baby stroller for vacation” has nearly zero competition when you analyze the onpage factors of the current sites ranking. You could find a list of such “low hanging fruit” KWs and populate your site with them before going after the high competition keywords. An easy way of finding these keywords is to look at the Google autocomplete suggestions.

Hi Tung. Amazing post. Learned a lot. I’m gonna apply the points you discussed here. Am planning to get 7 days free trial of Ahrefs for content research. Thank you once again for sharing the post. Cheers.

Nice article Tung. First of all thanks for this awesome article. This article can’t be written better than this, the way you explained this topic is fabulous. Today niche websites are making boom. Everyone wants to take a ride of this niche profit (?) business. But I too feel if you are the early bird grabbing the niche market first you will be king in long term. Some bloggers ask the question that which niche earns more. I want to tell them, “The only niche can make you good money is the niche you have good knowledge”. That’s it ! Thanks

Hie Tung What an interesting and informative article you wrote. I like your step by step approach and the clarity with which you explain things. You make the process appear so simple and straightforward. I am definitely going to apply your guidelines to build my first niche site. I have been hesitating to take the plunge for way too long, but with this gold mine of an article, I am going to dive in there and start on my first niche site. Thank you.

One of the most important industry where you’ll discover a slew of profitable niches for your blog is the relationship and dating industry. People are constantly looking for love, and both men and women want to learn how to attract the right partner in life.